That would be the Tomahawk-60. Every note fires a missile, and yes it's totally worth the money.stratum wrote:If your favorite developers were managing their companies the way Lockheed Martin does, I bet you'd be playing about $5000 for a mono synth.
Production Alliance
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- Banned
- Topic Starter
- 697 posts since 29 Oct, 2016
SLH - Yes, I am a woman, deal with it.
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- KVRAF
- 2256 posts since 29 May, 2012
So xfer couldn't persuade people to pay $9 per month and you think you will be persuading people to pay a lot more for a large number of plugins they won't really be using? I guess people in general prefer to pay more to keep the product forever.This is KVR, so yes, every single solitary beeping booping one.
~stratum~
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- KVRAF
- 2256 posts since 29 May, 2012
This seems to be arguing against mass production. Some poeple can buy a bugatti instead of a toyota, but most cannot. Not that toyota wouldn't allow you to "customize" their cars, but it would be one of the few options available.
~stratum~
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- KVRAF
- 2256 posts since 29 May, 2012
Interesting idea.
Continuing with the idea of $9 per plugin per customer per month, and assuming that the alliance has 100 plugins with roughly the same amount of cost to maintain, that looks like $900 per month, and assuming that you have persuaded every developer to join to the alliance, that means they are a monopoly now, and nothing stops them from making that value $1800. Further assuming that this company has some paper work to do as an additional cost (it's Lockheed Martin, after all) , perhaps they would even do that as a business requirement to cover additional costs.
OR
None of these plugins will ever get to be maintained. That's the only place cost cutting can come from.
Continuing with the idea of $9 per plugin per customer per month, and assuming that the alliance has 100 plugins with roughly the same amount of cost to maintain, that looks like $900 per month, and assuming that you have persuaded every developer to join to the alliance, that means they are a monopoly now, and nothing stops them from making that value $1800. Further assuming that this company has some paper work to do as an additional cost (it's Lockheed Martin, after all) , perhaps they would even do that as a business requirement to cover additional costs.
OR
None of these plugins will ever get to be maintained. That's the only place cost cutting can come from.
~stratum~
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- KVRian
- 573 posts since 1 Jan, 2013 from Denmark
I really think you're underestimating the framework and basis requirements by a huge order of magnitude. First off, 6k is a very, very low salary for such a specialized field, and given it's a single person that person is responsible for the full stack development (usually you have people expertised in one of DSP R&D, frameworks, GUI designers, platform guys etc etc.) not to mention testing and support. And it's even contracted... People pay a premium for support and rigorous testing and Q/A, so they have full up-time guaranteed, and they will definitely expect bugs to be handled asap.
Expecting someone to have the whole development setup is also ridiculous, as there are a lot of licenses (often subscribed) to cover to even be allowed to develop plugin for platforms like AAX.
When you say plugin companies are but a single paywall and a few HTML files.. I'm not even sure what to say, the fact that you're a software developer yourself scares me. I can assure you most companies of such a size we're talking about have automated test rigs & servers for all platforms (which, in itself is a huge cost + maintenance guys).
And yes, maintenance. Do I need to remind you someone like Apple periodically breaks backwards-compatibility (like, each year?)... As new plugin formats emerge, new hosts see the light, what then? Expecting software to just work is a pipe dream.
R&D'ing a plugin is like 1% of the business, process and expenses. Also a single, good plugin might take years to fully develop by a single developer...
Expecting someone to have the whole development setup is also ridiculous, as there are a lot of licenses (often subscribed) to cover to even be allowed to develop plugin for platforms like AAX.
When you say plugin companies are but a single paywall and a few HTML files.. I'm not even sure what to say, the fact that you're a software developer yourself scares me. I can assure you most companies of such a size we're talking about have automated test rigs & servers for all platforms (which, in itself is a huge cost + maintenance guys).
And yes, maintenance. Do I need to remind you someone like Apple periodically breaks backwards-compatibility (like, each year?)... As new plugin formats emerge, new hosts see the light, what then? Expecting software to just work is a pipe dream.
R&D'ing a plugin is like 1% of the business, process and expenses. Also a single, good plugin might take years to fully develop by a single developer...
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- KVRAF
- 2256 posts since 29 May, 2012
I'd say maybe the market is the way you describe, but you are still clueless about the technical aspects.
Virtual machines and realtime audio software ? Forget about it.
Websites? What a great estimate of technical expertise behind a company
As for this:
Virtual machines and realtime audio software ? Forget about it.
Websites? What a great estimate of technical expertise behind a company
As for this:
This would be irrelevant even if it worked. No I won't say why. It is left as an excercise to the reader.From an AI perspective, I can see simply data-compressing an R^N mapping(image) to mimic any plugin using meta-heuristics with the most basic functions/mappings.. similar to capturing impulse responses from eqs/reverbs/amps but for entire plugins.
Last edited by stratum on Thu Feb 09, 2017 10:17 pm, edited 2 times in total.
~stratum~
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- KVRian
- 573 posts since 1 Jan, 2013 from Denmark
Just a few points:
- It doesn't matter whether it's a business or not, the act of producing reliable software is so hard people nowadays produce programs only through the side effect of passing tests. Anyone can hack something together, and yes obviously many people will happily take a 6k paycheck but I doubt anyone capable of producing arbitrary plugins of high quality will do that. Well, actually it is debatable as many people profoundly love it and/or do it for free in their spare time - I'm just stating it wouldn't be fair, hence my previous comment about developers also being people.
- If you think audio dsp is but a learning curve that's great for you. It isn't for anyone I've met and there's a reason it's a university grade. Don't forget you're not only asking for a dsp engineer, but also a completely capable developer with an environment at the same time.
Again, I'm not technically against your idea (if it works out then great) it just doesn't seem realistic by a large margin. I guess we'll just disagree on what's required to make a line of functioning, updated plugins. Put another way, you don't think it's weird your $2 model is so much cheaper than the competition? You do seem like the go-getter type though, so I'm sure you will turn some heads around.
- It doesn't matter whether it's a business or not, the act of producing reliable software is so hard people nowadays produce programs only through the side effect of passing tests. Anyone can hack something together, and yes obviously many people will happily take a 6k paycheck but I doubt anyone capable of producing arbitrary plugins of high quality will do that. Well, actually it is debatable as many people profoundly love it and/or do it for free in their spare time - I'm just stating it wouldn't be fair, hence my previous comment about developers also being people.
- If you think audio dsp is but a learning curve that's great for you. It isn't for anyone I've met and there's a reason it's a university grade. Don't forget you're not only asking for a dsp engineer, but also a completely capable developer with an environment at the same time.
Again, I'm not technically against your idea (if it works out then great) it just doesn't seem realistic by a large margin. I guess we'll just disagree on what's required to make a line of functioning, updated plugins. Put another way, you don't think it's weird your $2 model is so much cheaper than the competition? You do seem like the go-getter type though, so I'm sure you will turn some heads around.
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- KVRist
- 284 posts since 3 Mar, 2004 from Denmark
Interesting idea! Ignoring the business case, I would have a concern aside from others i've seen so far:
From a developer perspective, developing the most highly voted features sounds like a less rewarding task than developing the features that I think are awesome. Obviously user demands are key to a product, but often the best products are the game changers: the ones people did not realise they wanted.
Another side to this is; users are not not necessarily experts in design. Even crowd sourcing large groups of users. The term "design by committee" is negative for a reason. I could foresee an (admittedly slightly extreme) scenario where a developer would be trying to find ways to shoehorn in features that don't fit, from a UI or functionality perspective, into their plugins because they are highly voted.
From a developer perspective, developing the most highly voted features sounds like a less rewarding task than developing the features that I think are awesome. Obviously user demands are key to a product, but often the best products are the game changers: the ones people did not realise they wanted.
Another side to this is; users are not not necessarily experts in design. Even crowd sourcing large groups of users. The term "design by committee" is negative for a reason. I could foresee an (admittedly slightly extreme) scenario where a developer would be trying to find ways to shoehorn in features that don't fit, from a UI or functionality perspective, into their plugins because they are highly voted.
